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Wilayat Sinai, the local ISIS branch in the area, killed more than 26 Egyptian soldiers in a July 10 attack on a checkpoint near the border town of Rafah, which is not far from el-Arish.

Forty ISIS terrorists died in that attack, which had been coordinated with former members of Hamas.

The jihadist organization, which is trying to expand its terrorist activities to the densely populated Nile Delta and other parts of Egypt, especially threatens the large Christian Coptic minority in the country of 92 million people.

In neighboring Libya, the Islamic State is once again on the rise, and is using the chaos to regroup and position the country as a base for its resurgence.

After been driven out Sirte, the Islamic State’s Libyan capital, ISIS is recruiting and regrouping in rural regions south of the east-to-west highway, as well as in the town of Sabratha, just 60 miles from the Tunisian border, Fox News reported Monday.

Tunisia serves as a springboard for the Islamic State’s renewed efforts to take over the oil-rich country, terrorism expert Robert Young Pelton told Fox News.

“The majority of their fighting force comes from Tunisia, so Sabratha is also a growing center,” Pelton said, adding that in Libya, ISIS can regenerate quickly.

The jihadist terror organization has reportedly built camps in the vicinity of the Tunisian border, as well as south of Sirte, where ISIS seemed to have been defeated last year.

Joseph Fallon, a U.K.-based Islamic extremism expert and a research fellow at the Defense Forum, said that the global threat emanating from ISIS’ latest moves in Libya should not be underestimated.

“Here, it can jeopardize western interests through guerrilla warfare sabotaging Libya’s oil facilities and ports and through calculated use of terror to unleash a mass migration of people to destabilize neighboring countries and Europe,” Fallon said.

Libya produces currently 885,000 barrels of oil per day, abut three times what it produced at this time last year, which makes ISIS’ renewed effort to control Libyan oil fields even more troubling.

Col. Ahmed Almesmari, a spokesperson for the Libyan National Army (LNA), estimated that the Islamic State now has between 5,000 and 7,000 fighters in Libya, far more than the 200 it had at the end of the battle for Sirte last year.

“ISIS still poses a threat not just to Libya,” an anonymous U.S. official told Fox News, “but to its neighbors, Europe and the United States.”